Promoting a willingness to wonder: moving from congenial to collegial conversations that encourage deep and critical reflection for teacher educators

Abstract

There is an inherent expectation that educators will work towards continuously improving their practice and quality of teaching. Underpinning this expectation is an assumption that educators also engage in the process of reflection. In this article, we begin by outlining the current tensions in the field of education that relate to managerialist concerns of the measurement and monitoring of quality teaching and effectiveness. We then contextualise our particular circumstances and provide an account of a collaborative action research project we initiated to examine our team-teaching practices in a graduate entry pre-service teacher education programme. In the project, we initially focused on how we might provide for pre-service teachers’ learning while they were undertaking an internship in the final semester of their programme. Factors that required consideration included the use of face-to-face and synchronous online forms of interaction. Having experienced the powerful influence of using protocols to structure professional learning conversations with the pre-service teachers with whom we were working, we also decided to extend the conversations we were having with each other to conversations with our colleagues. Taken together, the action research framework and the processes afforded by protocols provided a structured approach for our inquiry. Conversing with the pre-service teachers involved in the programme, with each other and with our peers at a faculty-level seminar and an international conference were the main sources of data gathered during the research project. The collegial conversations that occurred when using protocols also provided a way to move to the level of critical reflection. Rather than discuss the outcomes of our project in the remainder of the article, we elected to scrutinise and theorise the significant elements that were germane to our project – the three Cs: collegiality, conversation and critical reflection. We conclude by realising that to learn about ourselves as teachers and as learners, we need to move beyond routine and technical aspects of reflection, to a level that is critical and transformative, and that this can be achieved through the use of protocols in purposeful and collaborative conversations with others.